Do any of the following resonate with you or describe you? Can you relate to them?
- You like other people to like and admire you.
- At times, you have a tendency to be hard on yourself.
- You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not utilized.
- While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to hide them or find workarounds.
- Relationships can be challenging and there are times when you have been hurt badly.
- While in general you like people, there are some people and some social situations you’d prefer to avoid.
- To the outside world you present as having it under control, on the inside on occasion you have had significant doubts and uncertainties.
- While you prefer not to second guess yourself, at times you have had serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision.
- You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
- You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
- You are careful with whom you share your inner self because you have been burned in the past when you were too frank in revealing yourself to others.
- At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
- You have dreams and aspirations that are a stretch at best and possibly unrealistic.
A group of students took a personality test and were given results like the above and told by their professors that it was personalized results from the test. Even though ALL the students got the SAME results, the students rated the accuracy as 4.30 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). However, these students were no more gullible than the rest of humanity, they just got tripped up by the Barnum effect: “a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a broad range of people.” – Wikipedia
Why? Because the statements resonate sentimentally, strike emotional chords, tend to be flattering, and can offer a reassuring feeling of coherence and a framework we can fit into comfortably. Multiple psychological phenomena are at work, not the least of which are ‘confirmation bias: we remember the parts that fit and discount those that do not’ and ‘selective interpretation: vague language tends to result in us supplying our own collaborating examples.’
The moral? Just because something sounds right doesn’t make it right. The more you want to believe something or the easier it is to believe, the more cautious and skeptical you should be.
Closing Quotes:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman, 1918-1988, Cargo Cult Science, 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics
“We are vulnerable to the flattering illusion that a general truth is our own private secret.” – James Randi, 1928-2020, Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions
“Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at rationalizing beliefs they came to for non-smart reasons.” – Michael Shermer, b. 1954, Why People Believe Weird Things
“A horoscope is a set of general statements that sound specific. It relies on the reader’s eager willingness to fill in the blanks, supplying the precise details from their own lives.” – Carl Sagan, 1934-1996, Science as a Candle in the Dark
“People tend to take vague, ambiguous statements and project their own meanings onto them. The subjective validation is so powerful that the client actually does the reader’s work for them.” – Ian Rowland, b. 1961, The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading
As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier
Note: Every effort has been made to properly source any 3rd person material. I am, however, a voracious reader. If anyone finds any unattributed material, pls let me know asap and I will be delighted to give credit where credit is due.
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832
